@ John
There is not yet a way to mark featured entries. There is the Custom Entry Order extension. With this you could set the order of the entries you wish to have list top and in a specific order.
To set an entry to display at the top, you would set the entry order to 1. To have an entry show second, after the entry assigned to 1 you would assign that entry the order of 2. If there is no entry assigned as 1, then the entry assigned 2 would actually be first.
That said, I would recommend setting order by 10’s or even 100’s. This will allow you the opportunity to insert entries in between others. For example having entries assigned orders of 100, 200 and 300 would display those entries in that order at the top. So you could insert an entry in between 100 and 200 by assigning the order as 150.
Hope that makes sense!
As for “highlighting them…
You could create a “Featured” category and assign the entries you wish to feature to that category. That category name will be applied to the the entry class names which you could use CSS to target to change the visual style to however you wish to make them stand out.
Hope this helps!
